Network management Toolkit

Verizon's CTO looks to a 4G future

Marguerite Reardon CNET News

Published: 23 Feb 2009 13:45 GMT

The old technology wars that divided the wireless industry are being laid to rest as operators begin marching toward building the next-generation 4G networks. While there are still technology debates, most of the world's mobile operators, including nearly every GSM provider, are planning to use the same technology to build their 4G networks.

This is a very big deal for the wireless industry, which has suffered from infighting and technology incompatibilities over the years.

As one of the biggest CDMA operators now embraces the same technology path as the GSM community, there is finally hope for peace and seamless worldwide roaming.

As a result, Verizon Wireless, the largest carrier in the US and one of the largest CDMA operators in the world, made its first official appearance at Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona. Dick Lynch, chief technology officer at parent company Verizon Communications, gave a keynote speech and dished out the details on the company's soon-to-be-built 4G wireless network that uses a technology called long-term evolution, or LTE.

ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, sat down with Lynch after his speech to get more details on the network's launch and to find out what's happening with Verizon's Open Development Initiative.

Q: This is your first time at Mobile World Congress, right? Why hasn't Verizon been here before? It is the largest wireless show in the world, after all.
A: For one, we were invited this time.

Really, that's why you hadn't come before? You weren't invited?
Not really. I'm joking. But seriously, the more important question is, what do we see in Mobile World Congress now? And the answer is, if you go back some years, we went down a certain technology path, and it wasn't well represented here. But now we've reached a point — and other carriers around the world are reaching a point — where we have to make a decision about 4G. And we made the choice of LTE. It also happens to be the path for GSM carriers, so it's a logical time for us to come together.

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Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, said during his keynote speech this week that growth in mobile data will soon put a significant strain on current 3G networks. How much headroom does Verizon Wireless have left in its 3G network?
In terms of adding more capacity, there's still a lot we can do. There's cell splitting, for example. But we're in a better position than Vittorio is. He has different amounts of spectrum in different countries, and so he has different technologies allocated for different spectrum bands. He is more limited too because of regulatory issues — whereas we have a lot more options and are able to grow.

But Verizon is working on its 4G network. This might suggest that Verizon is running out of 3G capacity. How long before Verizon's 3G network is tapped out?
We could go for years on our 3G architecture by adding capacity. And there are a lot of things you can do to add capacity. But they're all more costly than moving to 4G, and they offer the same performance people experience today. And eventually, we think customers will find that insufficient for what they want to do in the future.

We can continue to add capacity, but we think in the next two to three to four years that consumer expectations will outclass the 3G network. That's why we are moving so quickly. We want to be there when the first wave of customers feels like 3G is not really fast enough.

How are you planning to roll out the new networks? Will there be devices that handle both 3G and 4G?
Yes, there will devices that do both. What is important to our customers is ubiquity even from year one. So where LTE is available initially in our top markets, people will use that. And where it's not yet available, they'll fall back to EV-DO [a cellular data standard that is the North American equivalent to HSDPA in Europe].

There will likely be more 3G coverage in year one than by year five. We will follow a similar plan to how we rolled out our 3G network. So initially there will be some subset of the entire country with 4G coverage, and we will expand that coverage every year.

How quickly will you be able to get LTE rolled out?
We're going to follow the model we used in rolling out EV-DO. And we'll be aggressive about the roll-out in 2010. So if you look at the rate we did with EV-DO, I'd say for year one, we could do 25 to 30 major markets. That is probably reasonable. Just like we did with EV-DO, we will initially offer the service...